The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

contagious joy appeared on his face, as if he just discovered that he’d become a father.

‘And how big is it?’

He walked back and forth, unable to contain his mysterious happiness.

‘Yes, definitely… send me a scan and the coordinates. I’ll inform the flotilla.’

Once he hung up, Sergio grabbed me by the shoulders.

‘We’ve been blessed. Nature is building your new home.’

‘A new home?’

‘The seaquake… it opened a fault line under the ocean from which magma is pumping out.’

‘Are you bringing us into a volcano?’

‘No, but as soon as the magma cools, we can claim the island that’s emerging from the sea. Now we too have something to teach Nature. Then with the flotilla we’ll think of the rest.’

‘The rest? That’s just going to be a rock.’

‘Yes, at first it’ll be uninhabitable, but we’ll terraform it.’

I turned my gaze from Sergio’s satisfied face to the geodetic cupolas. Tree pollen and mushroom spores floated around, carried by the ocean breeze.

The Green Ship took the lead of the flotilla. Seen from above, it might have looked like a school of fish migrating for the season. And we were part of that flow.

*

The sign posted on top of our new land had been modified. By changing an N into a D, it was transformed from ‘No-Man’s Land’ to ‘No-Mad Land,’ as the media had hastened to rebaptize the newly born micronation.

The islet where Sergio had first planted the flag – in his haste called ‘No-Man’s Land’ to underline its independence from whoever wanted to claim the territory – in time became ‘No-Mad Land’ for us. A place accessible without a passport, entry visa, or residency permit. A land designed to welcome people instead of turning them away.

I liked the wordplay of No-Man and No-Mad. Having grown up in a refugee camp between walls and gates, I’d been freed of those limits and I’d left all borders behind. Because borders, political or mental, are temporary obstacles. Because only those who have been turned away or who have enough imagination and empathy for others know how to appreciate the value of hospitality.

The accidental but highly probable birth of the islet in the middle of the Indian Ocean was followed by a phase of movement of thousands of tons of sand from the adjacent seafloor. Thanks to pumping systems, the aspirated sand provided construction material for five enormous 3D printers.

Two of them, aboard tankers, employed the same techniques that the Dutch used to tear the polders from the North Sea – creating dykes of natural material – to protect the central atoll. Yet, different from the polder, the architects supporting the project had thought up a porous, artificial structure that, adequate to host marine life, over the course of centuries would in part replace the irremediably damaged Great Barrier Reef.

The other printers focused on terraforming the cooling magma, rich with fertile substances. They mixed it with sand from the seafloor.

It took us six months before we could set foot on ‘No-Mad Land’.

To our touch, the ground was not hard, but instead it seemed supple and ready to be cultivated.

Under an orange sky, a carpet of yellow narcissus welcomed Billai and me. The air smelled fresh and the land emanated a narcotic warmth, stronger than the chillum that Noor smoked at the camp in Dadaab. The corollas of the flowers reached Billai’s bare knees, and I filled myself with the smell of the narcissus transplanted to the island from the Green Ship months ago.

‘Do you know why I like it here?’ she asked as she lay down.

I shook my head.

‘Because we’re all immigrants from somewhere.’

‘If you think about it, Dadaab was also like that.’

‘But it’s prettier here,’ she said, her smile showing disappointment.

I stared at her frail ankles. The first time I saw her at the refugee camp, she and two other girls were chatting while pumping water from a well. Each filled three jugs, two to carry by hand and one to balance atop their heads. They were three queens, models who strutted on dirt roads as if they were high-fashion runways. She wore a long, colored skirt, a scarf on her head, earrings, coordinated makeup, hair in tiny, neat braids. Her balanced gait was perfect, her gaze ahead, noble, full of nonchalance. She shone with her own light, a star with Black skin that emanated a supernatural aura as she passed, wiggling her hips between trash barrels, plastic waste, mismatched shoes, rusted pipes and goats that grazed on what they could find.

We made the whole trip together. Sometimes, like in Sudan, I feared that she wouldn’t be able to make it, like when we had to bribe the guy at the border. Or when she was hurt while we were crossing an area mine-laden by Boko Haram terrorists. But more than anything else, I feared for her life the night when two traffickers cornered her after realizing her beauty. She tried to defend herself, to stop the violence. She shouted for help, crying ‘Saidia! Saidia!’ but nobody moved for fear of being thrown in the sea for defending her. In the end I couldn’t stand it. I grabbed one of them by the neck and I flung him off the boat. The other kicked my back, grabbed my shirt and lifted me off the ground. I too would’ve ended up in the water had it not been for Professor Kysmayo, whose strong hands freed me from the grip of the trafficker and then threw him too into the dark waters.

‘You’re right, Billai… but unlike Dadaab, besides us all being immigrants, there’s something else that makes me love this place.’

‘What?’

‘That here, if we want, we can emigrate.’

She took my hands and said in her solemn tone, ‘How it has always been and always will be.’

Once in a while I talked with people back in Dadaab on the internet. Nobody wanted to admit that the refugee camp – provisional since the 1990s – had become a permanent establishment. Not the local functionaries who received funding to continue operation, not